


tears on the mausoleum floor

by portions_forfox



Category: The Hour
Genre: 1920s AU, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:11:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a list of things that are said and not said. in other words, the 1920s au.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tears on the mausoleum floor

**Author's Note:**

> first matter of business to address is that pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the 1920s comes from reading _the sun also rises_ , so this could pretty much more accurately be called _the sun also rises_!au. this was written for an [au ficathon](http://falseeeyelashes.livejournal.com/354990.html) over at [falseeeyelashes](http://falseeeyelashes.livejournal.com)’ a full month ago, but i’ve been busy and i still wanted to write this so idk HERE, take this weirdness that i wrote you guys. prompt was from [bluerosefairy](http://bluerosefairy.livejournal.com), who asked for a Jazz Age/Gatsby AU set in New York. don’t know if this hits on the Gatsby thing, but it’s Jazz Age so it semi works out i guess.

Marnie Madden, it is said, hosts all of the very best parties.

The invitations arrive in the mail all wrapped in silver tresses and addressed with black swirling calligraphy, a round cut-out of white lace in every smooth manila envelope. She drapes her father’s mansion in beads and pearls, low-hanging lights and white balloons, and outside by the pool there are cold wire tables, wicker chairs, tinkering music. The band are in tuxedoes, hair slicked, eyes blank. People tend to like it better that way.

When you’ve been invited to one of Marnie Madden’s parties, you’ve got one foot in the door to social matter.

When you’ve slept with her husband, you’ve got both.

 

 

 

Isabella Rowley is thirty-two, gorgeous, and executive producer of the East Coast’s premier radio news show. Her mother had said, Who’s going to listen to the news for a full hour, darling, and Bel had said, Intelligent people, Mother, now I asked you what the hell should we call it, and her mother had said, Call it The Hour, suppose, it doesn’t really matter at this point, so she did.

Bel has never been married. _Not even once?_ they all might ask you—Not even once, you’d say. She wears short black heels and drop waist skirts, clicks down the hallways with long, loping strides, never walks anywhere without a clear and stonecut purpose.

Her head writer is one Mr Lyon, Frederick if you’d like, Freddie if you’d like even more—nobody’s quite sure what he is. On his own, or to her. Nobody’s quite sure of anything about the both of them, except that they’re who Marnie Madden’s husband works for.

Hector, it is said, is a charmer. He’s got wide shoulders and big hands and blue eyes which sparkle if you look at him just right, and you’ll notice it is not very difficult to look at him just right. He’s the kind of man who puts his hand on the small of your back as you walk into a room, lips curled, smirking, into the back of your sifted hair.

He tried it, once, with Bel—first week he worked at The Hour. Ushered her through a doorway as she spat fast facts at him regarding his latest interview, and she stopped abruptly, wheeled around.

“Hector, need I remind you,” she said, eyes twinkling slightly in her tilted head—“I am not your wife.”

He smirked then, sharp white teeth aligned. “Trust me, Bel,” he simpered. “I require no reminder.”

Bel pursed her lips at him. “In that case,” she offered, and began to click away—“let me remind you of one thing that I _am_.”

“And what’s that?” he called after her, and the wheels in his charming head already began to turn, turn, turn.

“Your boss,” she said over her shoulder, and turned up the corners of her lips. He smiled after her, still clicking.

Freddie came by later, dropped a pile of papers hard on Hector’s desk. Tapped his foot till Hector took off his glasses and looked up. “Yes?”

“Don’t push it, Pretty Boy,” Freddie said. “She hasn’t the patience.” 

Hector leaned back in his desk chair, twisting slightly with his eyebrows up. “I find that quite hard to believe,” he said.

“Well then,” Freddie sighed, tossing the spectacles at Hector’s face—“ _I_ haven’t.”

 

 

 

Freddie and Bel first met, it is sad, at a dance.

It’s rather odd to think about now—both grew up New Yorkers, both went to public school and then off to the same college, followed by identical workplaces—but it was at a dance, not a work function or a study session, that they met. The dance was in Lower Manhattan, on a ground floor, in the dark. New Wave American jazz was playing.

She was twenty years old and a student. He was nineteen and a rogue. He found her tapping slightly near the bar and whispered closely in her ear, “Excuse me, are you at Columbia, then?”

She seemed unsurprised by his intrusion, and nodded. “Yes.”

“I am as well. Your major?”

“Journalism.”

“Mine as well.”

He nodded to the music, turned again and said, “So you have a boyfriend, then?” 

She nodded, this time with half of a smile. “Yes.”

Freddie shifted, his body tilted completely toward her as she faced the bar still tapping her foot; he skated his gaze over her hair, her eyes, the sideways slope of her nose, and half of a smile. He could only see that half of her anyway. For all he knew it could’ve been a whole one. He said, “Would you like to dance with me anyway?”

Bel grinned then, slow, and stopped her tapping. Slid her hand around to the back of his neck and pulled him out onto the wooden floor, skirt whispering at his calves. He laughed into her forehead, hands finding her waist. “There,” she said. “That’s it.”

 

 

 

Once, in a dark and smoke-filled club, McCain slung words over a glass of whiskey, hushed thick in Hector’s ear, “It is said you’re quite the charmer.”

Hector smirked his smirk, brought rum and gin mixed to his lips. “Is it said?”

“Quite.” McCain turned his head—“Do you mean to deny it?”

“Rumors do not equal truth, my friend.” Hector’s smile tugged up ruthlessly, and his eyelids crinkled. “Except when they do, and they do.”

McCain laughed, a throaty sound, swirled in smoke from black cigars. “You think you could charm the clothes off just anyone, do you?”

“It wouldn’t be baseless to say that I fancy exactly that,” Hector told him, grinning with his mouth puffing on a fat, bitter Cuban. 

McCain chuckled to himself, blew out a cloud of thick gray smoke.

“What?” Hector laughed, crinkling black-blown eyes at him, arms wide in the power clutch of his great leather chair. “Is there anyone in this _world_ think I couldn’t charm right under the sheets?”

McCain smiled just once. “I can think of one,” he said. 

 

 

 

When Freddie goes to open his mail on a Wednesday afternoon there’s one envelope that sticks out, cream-colored and heavy and addressed to Frederick Lyon in big, sloping letters on the front. Inside there’s a lace doily and a sheet of clean, clear paper—he, Mr Frederick Lyon, has been officially invited to the New Year’s Party of Mr and Mrs Hector Madden, to take place at their home on the Upper East Side on December the 31st, Nineteen hundred and twenty-five.

Freddie reads the card one more time and sets it down on his kitchen counter. He wonders what exactly he did to deserve this.

 

 

It is said that sometime into his second month working for New York 1’s The Hour, Hector Madden really began to be friendly with his boss, Miss Isabella Rowley.

It is not said that he followed her into the dark recording studio one night after everyone had gone home and stood in the doorway watching her fiddle with knobs and replay tapes, the sound of a deep eloquent voice feeding back to him in reverse. Rewind, and replay. Rewind, and replay.

It is not said that he mumbled, “Quite the voice on that tape,” and smirked at her when she jumped, whirled around. “Whose is it?” leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and his hair slicked and his eyes twinkling, because every time he looked at her it seemed she looked back at him just right.

“It belongs to this sop whom I work with,” Bel answered—“I’m always saying it’s a shame such a lovely voice should go to waste on such a terrible, terrible person.”

“Mm,” mumbled Hector, and pushed off the door, stepping toward her in the dark; his face lit up by the yellow lights streaming in from the hallway and hers still marred in shadow, frozen still. “How terrible?”

“Very,” Bel whispered, and it is not said that she felt the stubble on his cheek brush her temple as he stepped forward. “Very terrible.”

 

 

 

At Marnie Madden’s New Year’s party, Freddie is in the corner of the front room, pressed into the sofa by a group of too-old writers whose names he does not know and whose opinions he does not condone, too close to the open door with purple beads hanging from it, blood red light cast all over the house. Eventually the old men leave and Freddie sips his champagne, wondering when exactly he can either find Bel or go home, or both, if he’s allowing himself that kind of hopeless optimistic indulgence today.

It doesn’t occur to him that Hector might be the next drunk aristocrat to push through those beads in the doorway, and even less so that he might triumphantly declare, “Ah! There you are, Mr Lyon! I’ve been looking all over for you,” and that he might slide into the seat next to Freddie, shoulder to shoulder, side to side, thigh to thigh, miles of open couch space on his other side.

“Hector,” Freddie mutters in polite response, then raises his glass to his lips and drinks.

“I hear tell you’re writing somewhat of a retrospective piece on the war,” Hector nearly shouts, warm body pressed to Freddie’s side, glowing. “I was in the war, you know.”

“Were you,” Freddie asks, with little interest.

“I was indeed. And decorated, at that. All the men who went into the trenches came out truer men than they’d ever be—soldiers to the core.”

Freddie swallows, shifts his neck slightly to look at Hector, flushed and grinning and proud of the fight he’d put up. Freddie feels a rising, mounting annoyance made up of indignation at this man’s stupidity, his complete ignorance, his nationalistic idealism and his idiotic valiant notion of bravery and sacrifice and the nobility of death and killing and savagery and a girl, this woman with blonde hair cut short. Is it ever not about a girl? Two thousand years, Freddie thinks, after Helen of Troy and her single decade of heedless death and it still always comes down to a beautiful woman who made it all too easy to love her.

“Hector,” he prods, “how old were you when you went to war?”

“Twenty-one.”

“And you were a man at twenty-one?”

Hector swallows, feels something different in the air he does not recognize. “What are you talking about?” he says. “Of course, of course I was.”

“I believe you,” Freddie says, but his eyes shine like he smells blood and Hector knows all of the sudden that this isn’t the end. “How old, then, was the youngest member of your squadron?”

“The youngest—?” Hector repeats, then cuts himself off. “You can’t possibly be seirous, Mr Lyon—what I mean to say is you cannot possibly expect me to remember every Tom, Dick, or Harry who ever—”

“How old was the youngest?” Freddie asks again, this time with total clarity; a steady voice and a simpering smile. Something scratches at the inside of Hector’s chest.

“Sixteen,” Hector grunts. “He lied about his age because he wanted to fight bravely for his country.”

“Did he?”

“Yes,” Hector says, and his eyes glaze over. “He was very—brave.”

“And what happened to this Private…”

“Reynolds.”

“What happened to Private Reynolds?”

Hector swallows again. His fingers twitch. “He died.” He shifts again; “I watched it happen.”

“Did he,” Freddie wonders, but it isn’t a question, and his lips curl up. “And when this young Private Reynolds—tell me, Hector—when he was ling dirty in the trenches, face and body and clothing drenched in mud and dried red blood stains on the side of his mouth, a bullet hole in his side—when you and he were there and the final breaths were wrenched from his skeletal body, his last words whimpering a plea for home, begging to see his mother one last time, to live and not dear _god_ let him die because it’s just too soon, only sixteen years on earth is too damn _soon_ to die—when he was lying there bleeding out in your arms, do you think he thought once of his country? Hector, when he was lying there dying in our arms, did _you_?”

Hector’s eyes had gone very distant. His lips close into a tight bleak line and his shoulders shake; he stares at Freddie, Freddie’s ever-tumbling eloquence, Freddie’s _words_ , that little smirk plastered small and weak on Freddie’s face. “Was he a man, Hector?” Freddie whispers, and around them the party and the world go on, people chattering abuzz with gossip and the hems of women’s dresses coming undone at the seams and men’s ties unraveling and a blonde-haired girl by the pool with her hair undone, but all that’s here now is Freddie’s cutting whispers, a muffled plea towards commendation: “Was sixteen-year-old Private Reynolds a man, do you think?” Hector’s fingers curl, his knuckles white. Freddie leans forward, eyes glinting, the final bow—“Did he bleed on your hands, Mr Madden?”

It is said that Mr Madden snapped.

“ _Come here_ ,” he hisses, and people look up to see Marnie’s husband, big and towering and red and furious, digging his hand into the collar of tiny Mr Frederick Lyon, hoisting him up by his fraying white shirt, yanking him like a puppet behind the hanging violet beads and into the empty backroom with the hardwood floors and the closed windows and the untouched grand piano in the corner. Nothing else could be seen. The beads hung and jangled against each other for a moment more. The people returned to their gossip.

But whether it was said or it was not said, Hector shoves Mr Frederick Lyon into a corner by the window, hard jabbing walls sharp against his back and shoulders, and Hector leans up close and breathes in Freddie’s space, “You listen to me, Freddie,” his voice heated and low and frayed at the edges—“I am going to fuck you until there is nothing left for you to say, do you understand me? Nothing left. I am going to fuck you until there are no pesky little _words_ left in your system. That’s what you’ve brought this to.” He yanks Freddie’s collar and Freddie’s head tilts up, redness rising from his neck onto his cheeks, hard lines digging into his shoulders and clavicle. “I have to now, you understand?” Hector hisses. “I have to.”

“I never—”

“No, you listen,” Hector says, his hands up by Freddie’s neck, Freddie’s breathing heavy and uneven, “You listen to me.” He leans in, eyes sharp on Freddie’s and breath harsh with bitter alcohol, a cool cut of wind blowing in from the outside—“I wouldn’t do it if you didn’t want me to.” And this is where he sees the tectonic plates of Freddie’s face begin to change—the smile fades, the lip quivers, the eyes go blank. “You tell me for one second,” Hector whispers, fingers crawling up even tighter around Freddie’s clavicle, “You tell me for even _one second_ that you don’t want me to fuck you and I’ll walk away.” Hector pulls him. “I’ll way away. Just like that.” Freddie’s mouth opens, breath heaving out in racking gasps, bottom lip hanging open, purple and swollen and red with veins, and then he closes it again. Hector smiles. “That’s what I thought,” he says, laughing, and just like that, Hector wins again. “That’s exactly what I thought.” 

 

 

 

Freddie thinks, _Where is my Trojan horse_. My one final, desperate grab at power—that’s a God-given right, he thinks. I deserve at least that, he thinks.

Hector lets go of his collar, laughing softly to himself. 

Freddie grabs hold of his chin and kisses him.

 

 

 

Marnie is out by the pool with her cigarette in its holder. Her guests mill around her in droves and packs but she sits alone with her ankles crossed, high neck and coiled hair, smoking with her white gloves on. Bel Rowley comes over out of guilt.

“Mrs Madden,” she says, “are you quite all right?”

Marnie looks up, her face blank for a moment—then she smiles, angelic as usual. “Oh, yes, quite,” she says. “Sit down, darling,” and she offers her a seat. Bel sits in it, reluctant.

“I’ve heard quite a lot about you from Hector,” says Marnie, tapping her ash into the pool. Bel watches it ripple for just a moment, then turns back to Marnie, eyes focusing in the dark. “He’s ever so found of you.”

“Yes, he’s—” Bel begins; clears her throat. “Quite something.”

“That’s the word for him, isn’t it,” Marnie agrees, and perhaps she’s had a bit too much to drink tonight, because her smile slips for a moment. “ ‘Something.’ ”

Bel stutters, scared, “I didn’t mean—”

“I know, darling, I know.” Marnie looks around a moment, seems to gauge her surroundings. The party, the pool, the year on the table. Whatever it is that she finds makes her turn back to Bel with a metal tinge to the corners of her lips, a spider movement in her hands. “You know, he hardly ever fucks the same thing twice,” Marnie says, conversational. “Can’t stand the _routine_ of it, that one.” She laughs, brings the cigarette holder to her lips and sucks in, breathing in ash for far too long. “I can only imagine,” she says.

Bel’s mouth falls open, her stomach tightening. “Mrs Madden, I—”

“Please,” she waves her hand, “Call me Marnie.” She uncrosses her legs and re-crosses them the opposite way, the long sharp heel of her tall black heels bouncing in the light. “You’ve quite earned the right to know me on a first-name basis,” Marnie decides, looking up. “You being the exception, after all.” 

This time, Bel says nothing at all.

Marnie sighs and goes back to her cigarette, tilting her head to the women in the pool, one blonde and one dark-haired, both too tired to start a war.

“He’s fucking your boy as we speak,” Marnie says.

Bel never is sure which one of them she’s talking about.


End file.
